84 Ways To Help The Planet Starting Today.

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Seeing as how I am from Boston, I like to keep up with the local news there by reading the Boston Globe online. However, I must have missed this story because A. it was written in 2007 and B. I found out about it just the other day from a friend of mine. Seems that The Boston Globe published a long article with 84 different ways you can help the planet – some of them you probably already know, but there are a lot there that maybe you hadn’t thought of (myself included!). Check it out and be prepared to read a lot of pages with lots of tips such as:

STOP HAND WASHING THE DISHES GO NATIVE PASS ON PARTICLEBOARD SHAKE UP YOUR TOWN START (OR JOIN) A GREEN TASK FORCE CONDUCT A WASTE AUDIT MAKE SURE “OFF” IS OFF GET INVOLVED IN SCHOOL DECISION MAKING MAKE MACHINES LAST

and many more. Check out the full list over at The Boston Globe. I am still away on holiday but will be back in the full swing of things later this week. Hope you guys all had a Happy New Year celebration!

Reasonable list except for the first one about NOT washing the dishes by hand. I use about 8qt. of water when I do dishes and the water never runs continuously into the sync. Granted I do this every other night so that’s about 32qt of water per week. If people stick their dishes into dishwasher without rinsing them and it takes them about 5 days to fill it up then yes dishwasher wastes less water. Also I am not taking into account the energy and resources that go into building dishwashers. So shouldn’t people instead be educated on how to do the dishes by hand correctly? If someone can prove to me that my method is more wasteful then I will switch to dishwasher.

If only I had the option to stop hand washing my dishes! It’s true, there are lots of us out here that actually don’t own a dishwasher! Maybe I can use the list as an excuse to go out and buy one. Somehow that doesn’t seem too green either! Thanks for posting the link. It’s always nice to have a reminder.

have to agree with the others….i’m not convinced that hand washing dishes uses more energy/resources than the dishwasher. As a single person, i hand wash all the time; leaving dishes to accumulate for several days in the dishwasher until i have a full load is just skeevy to me.

i think the jury is still out on which is better, as it’s so variable, depending on how strong a flow when you let the water run, etc.

I too disagree with “stop handwashing the dishes.” I can do 2 days of dishes in 8 quarts of water which I then throw out on the lawn to water a tree. (non-toxic biodegradable dishsoap has not yet had an effect on the area and I live in a low-rain location and NEVER water the lawn other than with dish or laundry water)

the embodied energy in dishwasher manufacture, the power to heat the larger quanitity of water, and etc must be taken into account. Obviously if I were an idiot who left the water running the entire time I did dishes and let it all flow right down the drain, kept my hot water heater at some excessive level and etc, then this would not be true.